IT in dem olden days

I was reading Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox entry on improving screen resolution www.useit.com/alertbox and it made me all nostalgic. Briefly.

When I started in the tech pubs business, typesetting machines (at 2400 dpi) were being replaced by laser printers at 300 dpi (if you were lucky) or dot matrix printers at 75 dpi (if you weren't). Why choose a technology with much lower resolution? So that more people can produce material and not have to wait on the whims of typesetters and editors who knew their employment was based on a production bottle neck and were fighting a rearguard action. They lost. As a result, lots more crap was lying around at much lower resolution. Why did the creators of this crap think it was a wonderful thing? Because they had written it and their egos were stroked and because they had composed it on a green screen monitor at 75dpi. All that eye strain was worth it, wasn't it?

Also the IT people were young and enterprising. They wanted nothing to do with typesetting markup by fusty old editors, the smell of photographic chemicals or difficult typesetter operators who wouldn't stay late to finish a job. They wanted to bring pixels to the people. And build an empire they could rule in perpetuity. In the long run, they also lost when the WWW appeared so crap could be seen forever anywhere! Progress.